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Video: Geomerics’ new Enlighten 3 lighting system

Geomerics’ new Subway demo shows off the dynamic lighting capabilities of Enlighten 3, including the option to destroy terrain and keep indirect lighting consistent. You can read a making-of on the company’s blog.

Including both artist tools and a runtime component, Enlighten enables a range of approaches to in-game lighting, from fully baking lighting data all the way up to dynamic GI.

The technology is used by a range of other well-known game engines, including EA DICE’s Frostbite family, and is available fully integrated into Unreal Engine 3 and 4 – the demo above uses UE4.

The main new feature in Enlighten 3 is its new Forge editor (shown in the video above), intended as an artist-friendly environment for lighting and shading, with support for physically based shaders.

The viewport integrates Silicon Studio’s Yebis middleware – also used in the viewport of Allegorithic’s Substance product range – to provide a near-final-quality view of game assets.

Forge offers built-in import functionality from 3ds Max and Maya – the video shows it linking live to Maya – and can be integrated with studios’ proprietary scene layout tools.

Geomerics also tells us that it has also worked on its shader code to enable in-game assets to make better use of Enlighten lighting data. Indirect lighting now makes use of the albedo of a surface, baked lightmaps include a final gather pass, and directional output can be colour-separated according to RGB channel.

Pricing and availability
Enlighten 3 will be available at the end of March. Being middleware, it’s priced on demand, typically on a per-title or royalty-share basis.